Chronicle runs "clarification" on its dishonest reporting

By John Labriola - The Citrus County Chronicle ran a "clarification" notice in its local section on Saturday about a front-page hit piece published a week earlier that falsely accused District 4 County Commission candidate Jennifer Grogan of lying about reporting a death threat to police on July 27.

The tiny notice states that the Chronicle's Aug. 8 article "should have stated that after Jennifer Grogan reported a phone scam incident to a deputy, she told the deputy the caller made a threat at the end of the call." It then states that readers who are interested can read the "updated" article online.

No apology from the newspaper, which mischaracterized the police video it had posted on its own website, in which Grogan clearly says she received a death threat from an unidentified phone number. No mention that the "threat at the end of the call" was actually a threat to kill her. No online correction of sleazy editor Jim Gouvellis' Aug. 12 column stating the dishonest article was "how fairness works." And no online removal of three anonymous "Sound Off" letters on Aug. 14 congratulating Gouvellis for depicting Grogan as an untrustworthy liar who engages in "a desperate stunt...to garner publicity" and whose "absolutely ridiculous" embellishments make her unqualified for a leadership position.

I happen to know that the newspaper had to be threatened with legal action to even run its feeble and insincere clarification notice. The notice was of couse intentionally buried so deep in the paper that hardly anybody would notice it, and if they did, they would still have to search online for the updated article.

But anyone checking out the online article would first need to read through the first eight paragraphs — which are identical to the original and still label her incident as "routine" and "common" — before ever getting to any "clarification."

The article, which was updated on Aug. 14, doesn't state that the paper got anything wrong or that it smeared a political candidate just before an election by falsely stating she lied about reporting a death threat to police the following day at a county commission meeting (when Grogan urged commissioners to honor Charlie Kirk with a road renaming). The updated article just matter-of-factly states, "While the dispatch report...contains no reference to a threat, the video shows Grogan telling deputies about the threat at the end of the call and appearing to tell the deputy that's when she 'knew' it was a scam."

Again, notice how the Chronicle doesn't mention that the threat is a death threat and how it downplays the incident by calling it a "scam," which is not the word Grogan used. What she said was that when she received the death threat, that's when she knew the call was "fake" — as in not being a call from the police as the callers had claimed. It's not until the 16th paragraph that the updated article quotes Grogan as saying on the police video, "That's when [the caller] said, 'We just got you out of the house to kill you.'"

An editor's note at the end of the article states it's been "updated to reflect more details of the interaction with law enforcement," so that anyone who accidentally comes across the article will not know that the death threat was omitted in the original.

So let's recap: The Chronicle invents an entire narrative that Grogan is a liar who makes up outlandish tales about receiving death threats —  all to push for a Charlie Kirk road. The Chronicle's lie gets repeated on its Facebook page and again in a slimy column by the editor, and then in at least three anonymous Sound Off letters from writers promising to never vote for her. All this happens during Early Voting, convincing hundreds if not thousands of people to vote against Grogan. And then, after being threatened with a lawsuit, the paper buries a "clarification notice" that refers readers to an "updated" online article that downplays the incident as just a common, everyday "scam," doesn't get to the death threat until the 16th paragraph, and tries to cover up the paper's dishonest reporting.

The Chronicle, which is supposed to be our "newspaper of record," naturally has no interest in reporting the sheriff's office's own misconduct in the incident, since it lines up with its own dismissal of Grogan's complaint.

As the Citrus Crusader previously reported, Grogan told the sheriff's deputy who took the video, Daylon Rogers, that the caller recited her entire Social Security number, which a scammer hardly ever knows. She also told him the caller told her to come to the sheriff's office, which is very rare, and finally, that they threatened to kill her, also extremely rare in financial fraud schemes — which is how both the deputy and the Chronicle decided to characterize the call. 

When the deputy tells Grogan on the video that the callers were probably overseas, she corrects him by saying they spoke perfect English, which he dismisses by saying, "Yeah, they're getting better and better." Never does the deputy try to trace the call. He simply tells her to block it. In the written report, he calls the incident an "everyday thing" and fails to mention the death threat.

The whole experience has been a very stressful and frustrating one for Grogan, who believes that she may have been politically targeted and that her death threat should not have been dismissed.

"It's a shame that a woman reports a death threat and no one wants to take it serious," she said. "The police didn't take it serious, and now the Chronicle is making fun of a woman who got a death threat. They're making light of it when they know the truth."

After Grogan found out that the sheriff's office never reported her death threat, she went back. Her case has now been assigned to a major crimes detective who subpoenaed her phone records to trace the number of the person who made the death threat, which she was told could take 30 days.